End corporate rule
More than 90 percent of Americans want background checks for gun purchases, and another 70 percent want to restrict assault weapons.
Yet, despite the 7,000 children who have been murdered at school during the past five years, the NRA continues to get gun policies passed that serve only one end — to expand gun manufacturers’ profits.
Since the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling, corporations are allowed to pour unlimited sums of money into influencing our government.
It’s not just that the NRA is an especially powerful bully that is undermining our democracy and endangering our lives — all corporations can be too powerful and/or unprincipled. Exxon Mobil learned in 1978 that its sales of oil products would put the Earth into the disastrous climate crisis we are watching unfold. And pharmaceutical companies were aware that prescription opioids could addict — and destroy — hundreds of thousands of lives. In these cases, as in so many others, the profit motive trumped all else.
In today’s America, some corporations have compromised our democracy and put life, itself, at risk.
The huge political power of the NRA should show us that we absolutely must find a way to stop big corporations from stealing our democracy and endangering our lives.
One antidote is to win a constitutional amendment to overturn the disastrous 2010 Citizens United ruling that allows corporations to give unlimited contributions to politicians. Another is to vote into office those who will protect us from corporate bullies. Vote.
Noelie Rodriguez
Ninole
Oh, the irony
The Tribune-Herald’s headlines on Wednesday, March 14 — “Trying to ‘strike that balance’” and “Council rejects rooster measure” — made me laugh out loud at the irony of those stories.
Our County Council members don’t have the courage to tackle the crowing roosters’ problem in rural communities, but they are more than willing to tax people who own vacation rentals!
Anyone who lives, or has lived, near a rooster farm knows which problem is bigger! And, if our county police force had the courage, they would confiscate roosters during the cock fights.
Judy Stenger
Pahoa